By, Dustin Tibbits, LMFT
As a parent, discovering that your teenage daughter is cutting herself can be heartbreaking and overwhelming. It’s natural to feel a mix of confusion, fear, and helplessness, and ask questions like “Why do teenage girls cut themselves?” or “Why would my child start cutting?”.
Your teen and family are not alone. At New Haven RTC, we understand how difficult it is to witness teen girls in pain and engage in self-harming behaviors. Cutting is often a desperate attempt to cope with intense emotions, and it’s a sign that your daughter is struggling with something deeper and maybe keeping it a secret.
If you’re scared that your child is cutting and want to find help for your teen girl, we’re here to help. We’ll give you some answers to why teen girls start cutting or engaging in self-harm behavior and offer support on how you can help break through the secrecy and offer support with a calm, steadfast approach.
Key Highlights on Why Teen Girls Cut Themselves
- Teenage girls may start cutting due to overwhelming emotions, peer pressure, or as a coping mechanism.
- Parents play an important role in helping teen girls by recognizing the signs and offering support while understanding that self-harm is often a cry for help that can be a sign of an underlying mental health condition.
- If a teen girl’s cutting or self-harm persists, seeking professional treatment is essential. New Haven offers specialized residential programs that address the root causes of self-harm and help teen girls heal.
Table of Contents
Why Do Teen Girls Start Cutting or Self-Harming in Adolescence?
Teen girls and young women start cutting or engaging in other self-harming behaviors during adolescence because of struggles with navigating overwhelming emotions or feelings, intense social pressures, suicidal ideation, to provide a sense of relief or control, as a coping mechanism, or due to difficult mental health conditions that can arise during adolescence.
According to the author of Cutting, Steven Levenkron, other common reasons teens may engage in self-harm include:
- Increased Attention
- Addiction to the “rush” of self-harm
- Dissociate from something scary or overwhelming
- Acceptance of other “cutters”
- Pre-suicide gesture
- Cry for help; expression of inner turmoil
- Art – to some, blood is beautiful
- To punish self or loved ones
- A form of religious worship to expiate guilt
- To feel again, to drive away apathy
- To sense if self is real
- Sexual pleasure
- Impulse
Why Teens Say They Cut or Self-Harm
Many of the students we work with at New Haven have a history of self-harming and as noted in the below quotes, their reasons for this are varied and complex. Unfortunately, the practice of self-harm is becoming more and more common among today’s teens, especially teenage girls.
For many of these teens, it can become a strongly addictive, unhealthy way for them to deal with their emotional pain, possibly due to the release of endorphins and other factors related to compulsive behaviors. However, self-injury is not a healthy way to cope with difficult emotions or pressures.
I like it.
Keep Reading to Find out What Causes Self-Harm in Teen Girls
What Causes Self-Harm and Cutting Behaviors in Teen Girls?
Cutting in teen girls can be caused by underlying mental health issues like depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), past traumas, and related symptoms such as difficulties in expressing or feeling emotions, needing to feel a sense of control, or using it as a coping mechanism for overwhelming emotions.
It helps me feel better.
Find out How New Haven RTC Can Help Teen Girls
If You’re Worried That Your Daughter is Cutting, New Haven is Here to Help
It’s important to intervene and find your teen professional help from a mental health provider so they can address their underlying struggles and heal from self-harm. If your teen is showing signs or symptoms of cutting or self-injurious behavior, we’re here to help.
Our team of experts specializes in helping teen girls and families overcome mental health conditions like trauma that can lead to cutting or self-harm. Call us today for a free assessment and to find a healing treatment center.
How Many Teen Girls Cut or Self-Harm?
Cutting in teen girls and other forms of self-harm in young women and other youths ages 12-18 are on the rise. Research from the past five years shows a concerning rise in these behaviors, particularly among girls.
For example, a 2022 study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry found that a majority of psychiatric visits were related to self-harm, with most of the emergency visits involving young women. Another systematic review and meta-analysis published in Frontiers of Psychiatry Journal found that globally self-injurious behaviors in adolescents are extremely high.
It makes me numb.
In another highly coordinated study published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, researchers found that teens engaged in high rates of self-harm around the age of 15. In four out of the seven countries more than 30% of girls that age had harmed themselves. We now know what we long suspected: Girls are more than twice as likely as boys to cut their wrists and thighs, and to scratch or pinch themselves so hard that they leave a mark or bleed.
Keep Reading to Find Out What Types of Self-harm are Common for Teen Girls
What are the Types of Self-Injury?
Author of the book Bodies Under Siege A.R. Farza assigns self-injury into three types:
- Compulsive self-injury occurs when teen girls hurt themselves repeatedly in a day, and typically use some kind of ritual.
- Episodic self-injury occurs every so often and is typically more secretive. The self-harmer would likely not identify herself as a “cutter”.
- Repetitive self-injury occurs when a girl begins to self-harm over and over, so much so that it seems like (or becomes) an addictive pattern
What Types of Self-Harm Behaviors Are Common in Teen Girls?
The most common self-harm behaviors we see in teens at New Haven can include cutting, burning, and bruising. In addition, some young women will engage in risky behaviors such as starving themselves or ingesting chemicals as a way to create physical illness and pain. Here’s what parents need to know about each type of self-harm that teen girls may engage in:
It helps me to feel something.
- Cutting: Using sharp objects like razor blades, scissors, or needles to make superficial cuts on the skin, often on the arms, legs, or abdomen, as a way to release emotional pain.
- Burning: Applying a hot object, such as a lighter or match, to the skin, creating burns that can range from mild to severe.
- Skin Carving: Engraving words, symbols, or designs into their own body using a sharp object, often as a form of self-expression or to cope with intense emotions.
- Scratching: Persistently scratching the skin to the point of breaking it, leading to wounds and scarring, often as a response to anxiety or stress.
- Hair Pulling: Repeatedly pulling out hair from the scalp, eyebrows, or other areas, which can lead to noticeable hair loss and is often triggered by stress or anxiety.
- Hitting or Head Banging: Striking oneself with fists or banging the head against a hard surface, often as a way to cope with emotional numbness or overwhelming feelings.
- Pinching: Pinching the skin forcefully to cause pain and bruising, used as a way to distract from emotional distress.
- Choking: Temporarily restricting airflow by applying pressure to the neck, often to induce a brief sense of control or relief from emotional pain.
- Scab Picking: Scab Picking: Continuously picking at scabs or wounds to prevent healing and create new injuries, which can become a compulsive behavior linked to anxiety or a need for control.
- Wound Interference: Constantly reopening or aggravating existing wounds to delay the healing process, potentially leading to infections and long-term damage.
- Biting: Repeatedly biting into the skin to cause pain and leave marks, often serving as a physical outlet for emotional turmoil or inner distress.
- Eye Pressing: This can be a behavior where teen girls press or rub their eyes forcefully, which can result in damage to the eyes and surrounding tissues.
- Embedding Objects: Embedding objects such as pins or sharp objects in arms, legs, or other areas of the body.
- Ingesting Poisonous Substances: This could be ingesting dangerous substances such as cleaning products.
- Substance Use or Abuse: This could be abusing alcohol frequently or other drugs that cause harm to the body and worsen mental health.
- Jumping off High Places: Teen girls may participate in increasingly risky behavior such as cliff jumping to cause self-harm.
These behaviors may be hidden from parents and caregivers but are serious indicators of underlying emotional struggles. If you’re worried about your daughter, we’re here to help and are dedicated to helping your daughter find safer, healthier ways to manage her emotions.
What Does Cutting Behavior Mean for Young Women?
Cutting and self-harming behavior in young women and teen girls is often misunderstood, leading parents to worry that it always means their daughter is suicidal, seeking attention, or that they’ve somehow failed as parents.
At New Haven RTC, we want you to know that teen cutting is not always about a young woman wanting to end their lives, but rather an attempt to cope with overwhelming emotions, stress, or traumas that your daughter feels unable to express in other ways.
I use it to punish myself.
Cutting and self-harm can be signals that teen girls are in significant emotional pain and may need help from a treatment center or professional to address underlying mental health conditions or issues that can be causing distress or pain.
Keep Reading to Understand Suicidality and Self-Harm
If my Teen Daughter is Cutting Does That Mean She’s Suicidal?
Self-harm does not always mean a teen is suicidal, however, self-harm can be a warning sign that teen girls are thinking or having ideations about suicide, but it can also be a way for young women to discharge emotional discomfort that they don’t know how to manage in other ways, such as sadness, anger, and stress.
It’s important to note, that if you’re concerned your child or a teen girl is in immediate danger of harming themselves or is demonstrating suicidal behavior and may need 24/7 care and supervision to stay safe, you can take them to the ER or call 911.
It helps me understand my pain by putting it into something physical.
We understand how difficult this can be for parents and how many questions can arise when teen girls are cutting or self-harming. If you have questions about treatment centers or stabilization and assessment programs that can help teen girls who have had a mental health crisis overcome self-harming behaviors or cutting, we’re here to help. Contact or call our team and we’ll help you find a treatment program that can help your family and daughter overcome self-harm behaviors.
How Does Self-Harm Affect the Family?
Teen girls who are self-harming can impact family members by causing:
- Shame
- Confusion
- Fear for the cutter
- Fear for the safety of self (common among siblings)
- Conflict over parenting techniques
- Polarization in parenting approaches
- Denial
- Devastation
- Terror
- Depression
- Anger
- Paralyzed to act (walking on eggshells)
- Withdrawal in relationships between family members
- Increase of parental control
- Increase of sibling control (siblings may become protective of each other)
- Paranoia: fear of “getting another phone call”
- Inadequacy
Keep Reading to Learn How to Help Teen Girls Who are Self-Harming or Cutting
How Can I Help a Teen Girl if She is Self-Harming?
You can help your teen daughter by making sure your teen is safe, communicating with your teen and helping her build affirming, safe relationships, and seeking treatment when teen girls need it. Here are some other ways parents can help teen girls who are cutting or self-harming.
1. Make Your Teen’s Safety the First Priority
Before assisting a teen girl with her self-harm, parents and loved ones should assess whether or not she is safe. If she is not, reporting the abuse or neglect to the proper authorities and obtaining professional counseling for the young woman or teens can be necessary.
Secondly, parents and caregivers should make the home and school environment as safe as possible. Through situational planning, loved ones can remove or lock up objects that are too readily available for self-harm, such as shaving razors, kitchen knives, utility blades, and so forth.
Some parents find that routine, unexpected room searches or body searches work. It is wise to remove as many sharp objects as possible, understanding that self-injurers will harm whatever is around. Tiny screws in the light switch, a stray staple in the carpet, jagged rocks, and the sharp edges of construction paper – all of these are impossible to remove from a home or school.
2. Create Safe, Affirming Relationships
An important step toward helping girls who can’t seem to stop harming themselves is to engage in a relationship of safety, respect, compassion, and trust. These relationships are built on communication and safe spaces where teen girls can talk openly about what they are going through in a non-judgmental space. Parents can do this by being attentive listeners, validating their daughter’s feelings, and seeking professional help if needed.
It makes others notice me which proves to me that I am valuable.
3. Communicate Openly Without Shame or Judgement of Teens
The way to assist a teen girl who is self-harming is not to berate, cajole, punish, or threaten them with questions or judgments. Young women who self-injure can already struggle with doing those things to themselves.
Unfortunately, parents are often so scared by the self-harm that they also overreact. When parents overreact, they inadvertently shame their already shameful child. Their assumption is that their child is going to take the “next step” and commit suicide. It is important to know that self-harm does not always lead to suicide. While it can be a warning sign that teen girls are having suicidal ideations, it’s important for parents to communicate calmly and openly without rushing into shame or judgment of a teen girl’s cutting behavior.
Instead, communicate with your teen in an open, present, and non-judgmental way so you can understand more of where these behaviors are coming from and what teen girls may be going through.
4. Understand the Role Self Harm is Playing in a Teen Girl’s Life
When trying to help a teen girl who self-harms, I find it most effective to try to understand the role that self-harm is playing in their lives. I often ask myself, is it a language through which the young woman can communicate her needs to others? Is it a way for a teen to turn on or off her feelings? Is it a way for a young woman to feel important, noticed, and unique within her family or peer group? Is it a way to self-punish and make up for feelings of worthlessness or self-hate?
There aren’t words strong enough to match what I am feeling but cutting can show what I am feeling and so I don’t need words.
After communicating with a teen girl, it can help parents to ask themselves these questions to try to understand where a teen girl’s cutting or self-harm is coming from. Once we can identify the needs that self-harm is filling, we can work on finding other, more effective ways of getting those same needs met.
5. Encourage Teen Girls to Build Relationships
Building relationships and connections with people who are good role models and can provide the support that teen girls need can help when they are having difficulties with cutting and self-harm. These relationships can help young women. You can help teens build these support groups by helping them pick out some family members or role models who are good influences and who they can reach out to when they need a supportive person to communicate with.
6. Help Teen Girls Re-Establish Identity and Worth
Teen girls who are cutting can also experience difficulties with identity and self-worth. Teenagers struggle already with knowing who they are, adding in self-harm can make it even more difficult to maintain a strong sense of self for teen women. Self-injury becomes not just a part of them, it is them.
Parents can help teen girls rebuild their self-identity and self-worth without self-harm defining them by looking at photos or reflecting on supportive memories that remind them of who they are when they are overwhelmed by the confusion and pain in their lives. For example, maybe it’s a photo of her at the soccer playoffs celebrating with the team after a good game that you look at together. Or a photo of a fun family trip that reminds her that she is supported and loved.
7. Help Teen Girls Understand They Always Have a Choice
Our relationships should be built on alliance, not compliance. It’s important to emphasize to young women and teen girls that they have control of themselves. They can choose whether or not to engage in self-harming behavior. Especially in our society today, when so many young girls are taught to ignore their instincts and their inner voice, teen girls need a trusted adult to validate their competence.
8. Give Teen Girls the Tools They Need to Stop Cutting or Self-Harming
Once a teen girl sees the need and has the desire to stop her self-harm behaviors, it is important to help her learn some tools she can use to break these difficult patterns. Here are some tools and skills parents can help teen girls learn or use:
Teach Healthy Coping Skills When Cutting Urges Arise
I try to teach the student that just because she experiences strong urges to self-harm at any particular moment doesn’t mean that she “needs” to self-harm to relieve the urge. She has a choice of whether or not to engage in that behavior. I want to empower her to see her self-harm urges as an annoying “person” in her head who is just trying to talk her into self-harming.
She doesn’t have to listen to it, and she can find other ways to manage the feelings such as talking with a friend, going for a walk, deep breathing, meditation, playing with an animal, practicing an instrument, etc. The discomfort of resisting the urge to self-harm won’t last forever and she can learn to tolerate it and let it run its course.
Help Teen Girls Find Healthy Activities to Replace Cutting or Self-Harm
Additionally, I encourage teen girls to pick something positive or creative in their lives that they can immerse themselves in, such as painting, clay sculpting, hobby, or volunteer work. Self-harm has most likely filled a big part of their lives and they will need something else to put in its place. Instead of focusing on not doing something (self-harming), they can focus on doing something new (a hobby or volunteer work).
It gives meaning to what I am feeling inside.
Here are some activities that teen girls could use to replace cutting or self-harm:
- Deep breathing
- Relaxation techniques
- Call a friend, your therapist, or a crisis line
- Try not to be alone (visit a friend, go shopping, etc.)
- Take a hot bath
- Listen to music
- Go for a walk
- Write in a journal
- Punch a bed or a pillow (when nothing but a physical outlet for your anger and frustration will work)
- Hold ice in your hand (I don’t like this option, but some people say it works)
- Avoid temptation (i.e., shave legs less or only around others, etc.)
- Try to find your own creative ways as outlets for emotions
- Learn to confront others respectfully/make your own feelings known instead of keeping them inside
- Go outside and scream and yell
- Take up a sport (a form of exercise can help you release tension)
- Work with paint, clay, play-dough, etc.
- Draw a picture of what or who is making you angry
- Instead of harming yourself, try massaging the area you want to harm with oils or creams, reminding yourself that you are special, and you deserve to treat yourself.
9. Find Self-Harm Treatment When Needed
If your teen girl or a young woman in your family is consistently showing signs or symptoms of self-harm and your family hasn’t been able to help, finding the right treatment as soon as possible is an important next step.
Stabilization and assessment programs can help teens who have experienced a mental health crisis and are engaging in self-harming behavior to stop cutting and heal traumas or mental health conditions with trained experts. Residential treatment centers with round-the-clock care and treatment can also provide teen girls with the healing environment they need and evidence-based therapies such as dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) and trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (TF-CBT) that can help them heal.
What if a Teen Girl Has Had a Self-Harm Relapse?
A “lapse” in self-harm behavior in teen girls doesn’t mean that she is a failure and should give up. Many girls who self-harm tend to see things as “all or nothing” and this can cause them to want to give up if they make a mistake.
Learning from lapses and communicating in a safe space with your teen girl after she has had a cutting or self-harm relapse can help both of you understand what some triggers may have been and how to move forward.
It gives me something to talk about instead of my emotions.
If your daughter or a teen girl in your family has had a self-harm relapse and you’re worried about them, New Haven RTC is here to help.
New Haven is Here to Help Teen Girls Overcome Self-Harm
Self-harm and cutting behaviors in teen girls can be scary, both for young women and parents who find out their child is in pain. We understand how difficult this can be and how hard it can be for parents to know where to turn next.
New Haven is here to help your family and teen daughter. Our residential treatment programs and stabilization and assessment programs provide teen girls with healing residential care environments where they can receive 24/7 support and healing treatment that addresses the root cause of cutting and self-harm. We’ll help empower your teen to overcome difficult mental health conditions and traumas and start your family on the path to healing.
Call or contact our team and we’ll help you find a healing treatment option that can help teen girls overcome self-harm and start healing.